Flickr to offer video sharing

Photo-sharing website Flickr has confirmed months of speculation and responded to demands from its users to introduce video sharing.

Announcing the new service on the Flickr blog today, community manager Heather Champ said that videos would be limited to 90 seconds and 150Mb in size.

"While this might seem like an arbitrary limit, we thought long and hard about how video would complement the flickrverse," she wrote, previewing the service with a puppet show clip.

"Flickr is all about sharing photos that you yourself have taken. Video will be no different and so what quickly bubbled up was the idea of 'long photos', of capturing slices of life to share," Champ added.

The Yahoo-owned photo site will be keen to differentiate its service from the video-sharing market leader, YouTube, and has been careful to integrate the service with the more cohesive Flickr community.

Videos appear alongside photos in a Flickr user's photoset, but the video service will only be available to "pro" users of the site who pay $24.95 a year for more features and a bigger upload allowance.

Champ also announced that the site is doubling the upload allowance for free accounts and for pro accounts.

Flickr was bought by Yahoo for $35m in March 2005 and is one of the web company's strongest web 2.0 propositions. The site topped 2bn photos in November and between 3m and 5m images are uploaded every day.

· To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 7239 9857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 7278 2332.

· If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".

Sign up for the Guardian Today

Our editors' picks for the day's top news and commentary delivered to your inbox each morning.